Friday, January 19, 2007

Defense Tech: China Knows How Much America Has to Lose

There is probably no better way to get China's nationalists to demand a Great Leap Forward in military spending than to tell them they are two decades behind the United States.

Yet that is what happened after Beijing's use of a ground-based missile to take out a redundant weather satellite was revealed to the world on Thursday night. The United States, experts pointed out, carried out this sort of test in the 1980s, and abandoned them because they made too much mess.

When it comes to its strategic interests, Beijing does not care much about making a mess, particularly 530 miles up in space.